(139a) A Network Approach for End to End Material Traceability in a Chemical Supply Chain

The supply chain operations for corporations in process industries can be incredibly complex. Material consumption and production, shipments, and packaging operations may require tens of thousands of material definitions, physical movements between thousands of locations, and shipments to tens of thousands of customers. As externally procured raw materials are transformed and shipped numerous times, it is difficult to trace relationships between materials through upstream and downstream operations. There is growing motivation in the supply chain community for utilizing a network view of the supply chain to manage and analyze these relationships. We model a vertically integrated chemical supply chain network, based on the operations of Dow Inc., with nodes representing the entities in the supply chain, and edges representing the aggregate movements of mass between them. We use this network representation to define a system of equations which models the movement of mass in the supply chain throughout many different operational steps. The resulting method allows for the determination of the presence of mass within each material, which originates from any exact source within the supply chain. The flexibility of this method for accommodating various levels of supply chain network granularity is promising for end to end traceability of materials and enables numerous analytical approaches for coordinated management of chemical supply chain operations